There are two types of people when it comes to photos. First are the Martha Stewart types who manage to organize every picture into precious handmade albums constructed of used tissues and old grocery bags. Then there are the rest of us who dump our pictures in a box, and that's if we remember to develop the film in the first place. In this chapter, Adam Engst focuses on iPhoto's organizational features. Some require a little effort, but even with no work, your digital photo collection will be far better organized than the box in the closet.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

There are two types of people when it comes to photos. First are the Martha Stewart types who manage to organize every picture into precious handmade albums constructed of used tissues and old grocery bags. Then there are the rest of us, who dump our pictures in a box, and that's if we remember to develop the film in the first place. We in the second group hate those in the first group (though we're sure you're actually very nice people).

For me, the promise of digital photography was a way not just to join that first group, but to beat them at their own game. I'm constitutionally incapable of cutting a print to crop it, and my miserable handwriting makes captions painful. I figured I could do it all on the computer with no trouble and make prints to boot. Unfortunately, it was just too hard—until iPhoto.

iPhoto's editing tools are covered in a future chapter, so here we're going to focus on iPhoto's organizational features. Some require a little effort, but even with no work, your digital photo collection will be far better organized than the box in the closet.

And if you're one of those people who put together handmade photo albums before digital photography, well, you're still going to love what iPhoto can do for you.

Switching to Organize Mode

Whenever you're not importing photos, editing photos, creating a slideshow, or making a book, iPhoto ensures you're in organize mode. Thus, there are only two basic ways to return to organize mode from another mode:

In the Source pane, click the Library, Last Roll, or Last Months album, or any regular album or smart album to switch to organize mode and display the contents of the selected album.

When you have switched into edit mode from organize mode but are not using the Retouch or Red-Eye tools, double-click the picture (outside of a selection, if you've made one) to switch back to organize mode.

What's New in Organize Mode

If you've used previous versions of iPhoto, you'll want to pay attention to the new features iPhoto 6 brings to organize mode.

New features in organize mode:

The new cards and calendars are, like books, independent entities that are parallel to albums, smart albums, and slideshows in the Source pane.

When you scroll through your photos in organize mode using the scroller in the scroll bar, iPhoto displays a translucent pop-up containing the date of the visible photos and, if you're in the Library album, the name of the current film roll (Figure 3.1). Unfortunately, it doesn't work if you use a scroll wheel to scroll.

Figure 3.1 As you scroll, iPhoto 6 now displays a translucent pop-up that helps you figure out where you are in the album.

You can now include EXIF data when defining smart albums, which enables you to create smart albums containing images selected by aperture, camera model, flash, focal length, ISO, or shutter speed.

When filtering the contents of the display pane by keywords, you can now choose whether selecting multiple keywords presents photos matching any of the selected keywords or only those photos that have all the selected keywords.

Performance is distinctly better.

Albums and Books and Slideshows, Oh My!

Versions of iPhoto before iPhoto 5 put only albums in the Source pane. In fact, because of that, I called it the "album pane" in earlier editions of this book. However, in iPhoto 5 and later, other types of items can appear in the pane—albums, smart albums, books, cards, calendars, slideshows, and folders—so I'm following Apple's lead in calling them "sources" and the pane itself the "Source pane." In most cases, things you can do to one type of source (like delete it, move it around, or add photos to it), you can do to all the types of sources. When that's the case, I'll use the term "sources"; when there are exceptions, I'll use the specific term or call out the exception.